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Interactions between apparently ‘primary’ weather-driven hazards and their cost

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posted on 2015-10-22, 14:13 authored by John HillierJohn Hillier, Neil Macdonald, Gregor C. Leckebusch, A. Stavrinides
A statistical analysis of the largest weather-driven hazards in the UK contradicts the typical view that each predominates in distinct events that do not interact with those of other hazard types (i.e., are 'primary'); this potentially has implications for any multi-hazard environments globally where some types of severe event are still thought to occur independently. By a first co-investigation of long (1884–2008) meteorological time-series and nationwide insurance losses for UK domestic houses (averaging £1.1 billion/yr), new systematic interactions within a 1 year timeframe are identified between temporally-distinct floods, winter wind storms, and shrink–swell subsidence events (P < 0.03); this increases costs by up to £0.3 billion/yr (i.e., 26%), although impacts will be spatially variable depending upon the interplay of hazards. 'Memory' required in the environmental system to cause these intra-annual links between event types appears to reside in soil moisture and, tentatively, sea surface temperatures. Similar, unidentified interactions between non-synchronous events are likely worldwide, and the analytical methods we have developed to identify and quantify them are suitable for application to meteorological, geological (e.g., volcanic) and cryospheric (e.g., avalanches) hazards.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Environmental Research Letters

Volume

10

Citation

HILLIER, J.K., 2015. Interactions between apparently ‘primary’ weather-driven hazards and their cost. Environmental Research Letters, 10: 104003.

Publisher

© IOP Publishing

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2015-09-10

Publication date

2015-09-30

Copyright date

2015

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by the Institute of Physics under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

ISSN

1748-9326

eISSN

1748-9326

Language

  • en

Article number

104003

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